‘This Is Apartheid’ Billboards to Greet Biden in Occupied West Bank

“Mr. President, this is apartheid.”

That’s the message that U.S. President Joe Biden will see on billboards and digital screens as he travels through parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) this week—the opening leg of his first trip to the Middle East since taking office.

Prominent Israeli human rights group B’Tselem—which released an exhaustive report last year detailing how Israel is an anti-democratic “apartheid regime” whose policies impose Jewish supremacy over Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—put up the banners in the occupied West Bank cities of Bethlehem and Ramallah ahead of Biden’s Wednesday afternoon arrival in Tel Aviv to protest Washington’s unconditional support for such brutal inequality.

Without $3.8 billion in annual military aid from the United States, B’Tselem said in a statement, “Israel would not have been able to politically, geographically, and demographically reengineer the area under its control; to impose military rule over millions of subjects and deny them rights for 55 years; to annex East Jerusalem to its sovereign territory; or to systematically discriminate against its Palestinian citizens.”

“When the U.S. stops backing Israel’s apartheid—it will end,” the group tweeted.

Soon after landing in Tel Aviv, Biden reiterated Washington’s “unshakeable commitment” to Israel.

Jewish Voice for Peace Action has launched a petition addressed to the president calling for “an end to U.S. military funding for Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and an end to your administration’s shielding of the Israeli government from accountability in the international arena.”

Following the publication of B’Tselem’s well-documented analysis of Israeli apartheid, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—two of the world’s leading human rights organizations—corroborated its findings in groundbreaking reports of their own, and Palestinian groups have long made the case that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid.

“The human rights community has reached an updated consensus, shared across the board by Palestinian, Israeli, and international organizations, that this reality constitutes apartheid,” B’Tselem executive director Hagai El-Ad said Wednesday. “One U.S. administration after another has continued to back Israel with international support and immunity, allowing it to violate human rights without demanding accountability.”

Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA, argued that “President Biden must seize this opportunity to prioritize the advancement of human rights over short-term interests, and make clear that there can be no double standards when it comes to promoting human rights.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org, written by Kenny Stancil.